Ken O’Donnell noted the way Kennedy was affected by what he saw in West Virginia. “Here right in our midst was a great mass of people totally ignored, yet they didn’t complain as he talked to them. They didn’t like it; they weren’t lazy, they were just people who’d been in poverty so long they didn’t know a way out.” Pierre Salinger saw the same thing. “I believe West Virginia brought a real transformation of John F. Kennedy as a person. He came into contact, really for the first time, with poverty. He saw what had happened as a result of the technological changes in coal mining. He saw hundreds of people sitting around the city with nothing to do. It affected him very deeply. It really, in my opinion, changed his whole outlook on life.”
What now made a difference to the campaign’s fortunes in West Virginia was the inherited prestige of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. The president’s son and namesake was brought in to strike at the Minnesotan’s soft underbelly, his failure to fight in World War II. From here on in, the gloves were off. The conclusion of that conflict was just fifteen years in the past, and memories of its horrors and its casualties, along with its many great acts of heroism, hadn’t faded. Ben Bradlee knew how Jack always wanted to know where a fellow of his generation had been in the “wor-ah.” It was a key for him, a key to sizing up other men.
Humphrey was vulnerable, and the wartime president’s son spread the news. Humphrey twice had attempted to enlist only to be rejected for medical reasons. But to guarantee that no voter remained unaware of who’d served and who hadn’t, the Kennedys undertook a comprehensive education program. Souvenir PT 109 insignia emblems of Jack Kennedy’s wartime heroism were put on sale at the affordable price of a dollar. A letter from FDR Jr. endorsing the young candidate, was mailed to West Virginia voters. It was postmarked Hyde Park, New York, unmistakably signaling its connection to America’s greatest Democrat.
Out on the campaign trail, Kennedy made it clear to the curious crowds that came to hear him that here was a chance for little West Virginia to choose the country’s top leader. “The basic strategy was a psychological one,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “That is, let West Virginia play a role in selecting the next president of the United States. If Hubert Humphrey wins the West Virginia primary, he will never receive the nomination of the Democratic Party. Therefore, you are throwing your vote away. If John F. Kennedy wins the West Virginia primary, you will have selected the next president of the United States.”
Salinger confessed the campaign’s subtext. The state had a lot to gain from electing a president. “West Virginia, the fiftieth state in the union in defense contracts, wanted to be with a winner who would remember it. John F. Kennedy sold West Virginia on the fact that if he became president he would never forget West Virginia.”
Money also played a crucial role. The county political people expected to be paid for their election efforts, and the Kennedys would do what was expected. West Virginia was a state, after all, where the facts of political life weren’t overseen by reformers. The decisive swing came on election eve, when the largest amounts yet of Kennedy cash started falling into outstretched hands. Humphrey could do little but complain. “I’m being ganged up on by wealth. I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.”
Salinger didn’t argue with the assessment. “We were running the campaign there as if you were running a campaign to elect a ward leader in New York or Chicago. We whipped this campaign down to the sheriffs, the district attorneys, and the councilmen because this is the way you win elections in West Virginia.”
The Nixon backer Charles McWhorter, a native of the state, saw it as a daunting preview of the general election. “They went through West Virginia like a tornado, putting money—big bucks!—into sheriffs’ races. You were either for Kennedy or you weren’t. The Kennedy people just wanted the gold ring. They were ruthless in that objective. That scared the shit out of me.”
In the last days, Kennedy was campaigning so hard that he lost his voice. Trying to rest it, he scribbled a note to Charlie Bartlett just as the final showdown at the polls was about to occur. What he wrote said it all: “I’d give my right testicle to win this one.”
But, as he had told Ben Bradlee, he would not be maneuvered into a corner. He would not let the entire campaign hang on winning one difficult primary. His mind was racing ahead to whatever the West Virginia results might require. He warned his old college friend, and now U.S. congressman, Torby Macdonald, who was running the Kennedy campaign in Maryland, that he might need him more than ever. The primary there was to take place that Friday.
“If Jack were beaten in West Virginia,” Macdonald said, “then this would be a bail-out operation, in which he’d win so overwhelmingly in Maryland that everyone would forget about West Virginia. It may have been wishful thinking, but that was the point—and that’s why I worked as hard as I did in Maryland.”
Just as Jack Kennedy had refused to sit on that little island in the Solomons, awaiting a rescuer for him and his men, just as he’d swum again and again out into the water looking for help, just as he’d sent Barney Ross when he couldn’t do it, now he was sending an S.O.S. to his buddy Torby. When it came to survival, he was not a pessimist, but he was seized by the fear that West Virginia had slipped from his hands.
He made sure to fly back to Washington, D.C., as the actual election was getting under way. He’d look even more a loser should the results go against him and he was there, hanging around in West Virginia, on primary night.
To pass the time while the votes came in, the Kennedys, joined by the Bradlees, went out to dinner. Getting away from the action and the teasing hints from the early returns is standard political practice. For his sanity, a candidate needs to remove himself, however momentarily, from the minute-to-minute rumblings and false reports bringing alternating euphoria and gloom. It’s also a pleasure to find yourself alone with good friends after weeks of craziness with strangers.
Bradlee remembers: “The Kennedys asked us to sweat the vote out with them at dinner, but dinner was over long before any remotely meaningful results were in. After a quick call to brother Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston, we all got into their car and drove to the Trans-Lux theater to see Suddenly Last Summer. Bad omen. It was a film with a surprise ending, whose publicity included a warning that no one would be admitted after the show started.”
They ended up at a film showing around the corner from the White House. To Bradlee it seemed like porn. “Not the hard-core stuff of later years, but a nasty little thing called Private Property, starring Kate Manx as a horny housewife.” Bradlee said he and Kennedy “wondered aloud if the movie was on the Catholic index of forbidden films”—it was—and “whether or not there were any votes in it either way for Kennedy in allegedly anti-Catholic West Virginia if it were known he was in attendance.”
“Kennedy’s concentration was absolutely zero,” Bradlee recalled. “He left every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia. Each time he returned, he’d whisper ‘Nothing definite yet,’ slouch back into his seat and flick his teeth with the fingernail of the middle finger on his right hand, until he left to call again.”
Word suddenly came that Kennedy had won. The foursome headed to National Airport and boarded the Caroline for the short hop to the state that had just defied all the doomsayers, all the experts, all the Democrats backing the wrong horse.
The moment of Kennedy’s victory speech, O’Donnell recalled, was both ecstatic and poignant. “He gave the usual speech—about the hard work, and about what wonderful people they all were, and that he would keep his word to them. . . . And if he won the presidency he intended to come back to West Virginia and keep his word. That all the things he’d seen there that disturbed him so much, as president of the United States he’d do something about. That hadn’t just been campaign talk. It was a commitment. And then he moved in and worked the room and shook everyone’s hand.”
What a night! “The place was jammed and it was around t
wo a.m., and he came over and thanked us,” O’Donnell continued. “He pulled me aside and shook his head and said, ‘What the hell happened? We won!’ I just laughed and shook my head, looked at Bobby, who was exhausted. He nodded.” For his part, Salinger could see a weight had lifted: “He was elated. He knew he’d been nominated.”
Ben Bradlee, though, was stunned to see how little attention the exhilarated victor showed his wife that night. “Kennedy ignored Jackie, and she seemed miserable at being left out of things. She was then far from the national figure she later became in her own right. She . . . stood on a stairway, totally ignored, as JFK made his victory statement on television. Later, when Kennedy was enjoying his greatest moment of triumph to date, with everyone in the hall shouting and yelling, Jackie quietly disappeared and went out to the car and sat by herself, until he was ready to fly back to Washington.”
The candidate was alone in his triumph.
30
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHARISMA
How does Jack get them girls to squeal that way?
—Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia
Jack Kennedy’s singular personal appeal was recognized by Ken O’Donnell for the first time at the Worcester tea in 1952. He noticed how women simply stared at the candidate. The effect Kennedy had on people, most noticeably women, is visible today in films from the Wisconsin primary. You see high-school-age girls racing down the sidewalk merely to capture a glimpse of him. As the campaign entered the general election phase in 1960, and the crowds around Kennedy grew deeper, these young women—“jumpers” they were called—would leap into the air to see over the heads of those in front of them.
It takes more than sex appeal, however, to win the American presidency. To gain the Democratic nomination, those victories in Wisconsin and West Virginia were necessary, but not sufficient. Jack still needed to conquer the resistance of pivotal governors, many of whom were Catholic like himself. It was not about whom they liked, or with whom they felt comfortable; the decisive question was whether they could be pushed to do what they didn’t want to do: commit, put their own political careers on the line for a guy who might well be stopped short of the nomination, halted for the sin of having the same religion as their own. These men had their own ambitions, too. They wanted the leverage, the clout that comes to a governor who arrives at a national convention with a bevy of delegates under his control.
But Jack Kennedy wanted those delegates under his control. He wanted the nomination locked up before he reached Los Angeles for the basic, understandable reason that he’d seen what could happen in the middle of a Democratic Convention roll call. People who don’t want you to win can stop you in your tracks, just at the very moment when you and your people think you’ve got it in the bag. Just four years before, he’d seen it unfold like that in Chicago.
So, to prevent it from happening again, he was taking certain steps, of a sort familiar to the Onions Burkes of this world.
It had started with Ohio. Bobby’s strong-arm treatment of Mike DiSalle had ensured that the Ohio governor was headed to L.A. on the Kennedy bandwagon. Next had been Maryland, whose primary came the Friday after West Virginia’s. Bobby, now an expert at strong-arm tactics, had taken care of the dirty work there, from the moment the campaign learned that Governor J. Millard Tawes planned on running unopposed on the primary ballot as a “favorite son.” He wanted to arrive in California with the state’s delegates under his personal control. The Kennedy brothers, however, thought otherwise. Just as he had in Ohio with DiSalle, Bobby went to meet with Governor Tawes personally. Here’s Ken O’Donnell’s account:
“We talked to the governor and suggested that the governor might want to talk to Bobby Kennedy alone, that he’d acquaint him with what our desires and our intentions were, and that he’d relay back to the senator what Governor Tawes’s intentions and desires were. We ushered the governor into a bedroom and Bobby went in and the governor was not happy, looking over his shoulder for some assistance. But there was none forthcoming. We closed the door.”
Once the door opened again, Tawes had agreed to what the Kennedy forces wanted: an open run for the primary in Maryland.
The Kennedy treatment of Governor Pat Brown of California was cordial, if only in comparison. Brown, after much prodding from Jack himself, O’Donnell, and O’Brien, worked out a deal. It was simple enough: he’d run on the ballot unopposed in his home state and then hand over his delegates at the convention if Kennedy continued to sweep the primaries and lead in the Gallup poll. Even with this agreement between Brown and Jack, Bobby continued to put pressure on the California governor. Although Senator Kennedy had agreed not to run in the California primary as long as Pat Brown was the only candidate on the ballot, Bobby filed a last-minute delegation. It was an insurance policy against the possibility of Hubert Humphrey attempting a comeback in delegate-rich California, where loyalties to the old liberal crowd ran high. Bobby agreed to withdraw the Kennedy slate of delegates only after Humphrey gave his personal guarantee he wouldn’t try to sneak in at the wire.
Fred Dutton, who was Pat Brown’s top political guy, thought this final move showed moxie on the Kennedy side. “It was a pretty good example of the sort of hard-boiled game that the Kennedy group was playing. They were just protecting themselves, they said.”
Even after the California primary, the Kennedy campaign wouldn’t let up. According to Dutton, “The Kennedys, as soon as the primary was over with, ran a very aggressive war of nerves to try to get Brown to come out for them and to pull over as many California delegates as they could. Bobby was in the state a half-dozen times; Larry O’Brien came out and met with me. They had every right to be worried, since a strong pro-Stevenson contingent made it increasingly difficult for Pat Brown to support Kennedy if he was going to protect his own skin in local politics. Liberals loyal to Adlai were beginning to make an eleventh-hour run for their twice-nominated hero. He’d taken on the challenge of Ike, went the argument. Didn’t he deserve the chance to beat the now far more beatable Nixon?”
Bobby again refused to allow any possibility of this romance with the past taking hold. He was keeping his fingers around Brown’s throat. “He was calling up and was impatient, a little petulant, and not at all understanding of why Brown couldn’t make up his mind.” Dutton figured he either didn’t understand Brown’s political problems or, if he did, he wasn’t going to show he did. Bobby Kennedy was not the sort to see it from the other guy’s point of view. Besides, his job was not to be convinced. “I’m not running a popularity contest,” he told Time’s Hugh Sidey. “It doesn’t matter if they like me or not. If people are not getting off their behinds and working enough, how do you say that nicely? Every time you make a decision in this business, you make somebody mad.”
Next in line was Pennsylvania. Jack Kennedy knew that Governor David Lawrence feared a backlash if he supported him. Having been the first of his religion to rise to this position there, he was uneasy about endorsing a fellow Catholic. To win Lawrence over, Jack needed an inside man. He found him in U.S. congressman William Green, who chaired the Democratic Party in Philadelphia. Green was a consummate big-city political boss. Two years earlier he had used his clout to get Lawrence the nomination for governor. After West Virginia, he was convinced his fellow Irish-Catholic had proven himself the strongest candidate. He believed no other Democrat would stand a chance of beating Richard Nixon. With the bulk of Pennsylvania’s delegates in his control, he began putting pressure on Lawrence to drop his loyalty to Stevenson and lead the delegation to Kennedy.
Despite Green’s backing, the governor remained stubborn. Lawrence remained neutral even after Kennedy’s impressive victory in the Pennsylvania primary as a write-in on the ballot. Time was starting to run short, and the deal needed to be closed. Thus, at the invitation of Governor Lawrence, Kennedy spoke at a luncheon in Pittsburgh that included the county leaders in the western part of the state. Lawrence himself introduced Kennedy, but wasn’t very war
m. Implying in his remarks that Kennedy’s write-in triumph still wasn’t the last word, the governor seemed to have asked Jack to Pittsburgh to audition for a job he’d already won.
Understanding that he’d been set up, Kennedy strode to the stage. “I could tell, as Governor Lawrence was speaking, that the senator was very angry,” O’Donnell recalled. “He got up and laid it out cold and hard to them, that these political leaders better think what was going to happen to the Democratic Party if the candidate who’d won all the primaries and amassed all the delegates could be denied the nomination simply for being an Irish Catholic. He told them they’d better think long and hard about what might be left of the Democratic Party should they follow this course.
“Then he ended with a tough—and I mean tough—attack on Lawrence, kicking him good and hard where it hurts the most. All the color drained from Governor Lawrence’s face. He was stunned. There was a muttering in the room and a nodding of heads in agreement, along with chilly looks directed at Lawrence . . . who got up suddenly, almost knocked his chair over, and rushed out the door, claiming he had a meeting to go to. He didn’t even say good-bye to the senator, just fled the room. The rest of the people at the meeting got up and cheered and swarmed the senator.”
New York was a different story. There Kennedy had all the Irish bosses working for him. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former aide to Governor Harriman, described the situation: “It was still the last moment in history where Irish political leaders had that much power.” Rip Horton, Kennedy’s Choate classmate and Princeton roommate, was a New York volunteer who saw Kennedy’s religion pay dividends in the cities. “This organization, this Kennedy-for-President movement, encompassed everywhere: Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. So the politicians were responding to the electorate,” seeing he might be a help to local candidates in their elections. His momentum was starting to be infectious.
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